About Me

I am a lawyer in Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canada who enjoys reading, especially mysteries. Since 2000 I have been writing personal book reviews. This blog includes my reviews, information on and interviews with authors and descriptions of mystery bookstores I have visited. I strive to review all Saskatchewan mysteries. Other Canadian mysteries are listed under the Rest of Canada. As a lawyer I am always interested in legal mysteries. I have a separate page for legal mysteries. Occasionally my reviews of legal mysteries comment on the legal reality of the mystery. You can follow the progression of my favourite authors with up to 15 reviews. Each year I select my favourites in "Bill's Best of ----". As well as current reviews I am posting reviews from 2000 to 2011. Below my most recent couple of posts are the posts of Saskatchewan mysteries I have reviewed alphabetically by author. If you only want a sentence or two description of the book and my recommendation when deciding whether to read the book look at the bold portion of the review. If you would like to email me the link to my email is on the profile page.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Personal Choices in the Third Reich

Albert Goring

I have been thinking about choices this
year as I have read a group of books about life in Western Europe during the
Third Reich.

In The
Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J. Mazzeo there
were the choices made by the owners and staff of a great hotel in Paris, the
Ritz, during the German occupation. High ranking Germans stayed at the hotel.
They enjoyed meals and celebrations with their French mistresses and French
citizens working with the occupiers. While some hotel workers were in the
French Resistance at the hotel they spent their shifts making life comfortable for
the German occupiers. Madam Ritz and her staff conducted business as usual.

Choices were possible in Occupied
Europe. The leaders of Bulgaria worked to protect their nation’s Jewish
population. They refused to let them be deported to concentration camp. At the
same time they made the choice not to oppose the transport of thousands of Jews
from other nations, mainly Greece, who had sought refuge in Bulgaria.

I have written about my personal contacts
with individual choices made in Occupied Europe. I met a Danish farm family who
sheltered a German Jewish girl. I know a Dutch war bride who as a teenager
altered ID cards in an office next to the local German Army headquarters. She
successfully saved young men from being sent to Germany as slave labour.

Hitler’s
Art Thief by Susan Ronald explored the life
of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a respected professor of art history and museum
director, who made the choice to become an art dealer benefiting from the
forced sales, confiscations and looting of art works under Nazi rule. He was a
classic war profiteer only concerned with profiting from the opportunities of
war. He was uncaring about the fate of Jews beyond his family. He exploited Nazi
ideology to become rich. Cooly objective he was among the earliest to realize
how the Nazis would govern and conqueor and later that they were going to lose
the war. He made money in victory and defeat.

By contrast, Josef Muller, in Church of Spies by Mark Riebling made a
different set of personal choices. A lawyer and devout Catholic he could have
had a profitable war. Refusing to grovel to Heinrich Himmler in the mid-1930’s
he turned down an invitation to join the SS because its principles were opposed
to his principles. He aided Jews in his law practice. Muller opposed Hitler
acting as a courier and a liason between Pope Pius XII and the German
Resistance led by Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr. He put his life at stake.

Albert Goring made choices that were
both profitable and principled. The brother of Hermann Goring he enjoyed
opportunities in the armaments industry spending most of the war working as the
export director of Skoda in Czechoslovakia. While diligently working to build
weapons for the Wehrmacht he also aided Jews and others being persecuted by the
Nazis. Using his connections with Hermann he saved a significant number of
people. He refused to adopt the customs of the Nazis. He was known in
Czechoslovakia for responding to the stiff arm of the Hitler salute with a lift
of his hat.

For German soldiers there was the
decision on whether to participate in the Holocaust. For every fictional Bernie
Gunther who refused to take part and was re-assigned there were an abundance of
real life Arthur Nebe’s who moved from the Berlin Police Department to the
killing fields of Western Russia in 1941.

Average Germans had their own
choices.

Several thousand Berlin residents
protected, fed and housed about 2,000 Jews during the war. These Jews were
known as U-boats as they secretly lived in Germany’s capital.

Many more thousands personally
profited from the Holocaust. In Seduced by
Hitler there is the story of how over 100,000 residents of Hamburg chose to
buy, from 1941 to 1945, at bargain prices in public auctions the furnishings confiscated from Jews
sent to concentration camps. Such auctions were held throughout Germany.

Gitta Sereny in her book, The Healing Wound, talked about an
aspect of German culture that continues to lead Germans to conformity with the
prevailing establishment. She spoke of “Obrigkeit
– authority or hierarchy”. In talking about young people a generation after the
war she said:

Only a few of them connect own incapacity for battling with
authority, with the unprecedented success of the totalitarian idea in Germany.

While culture played a role every
German made his or her own choices.

In my travels to Germany I have met
one man who was an avowed Nazi. It was in 1981 and he had been physically unfit
to serve during the war. He had an amazing collection of German war memorabilia and
would ring a bell next to a skull in a German helmet in honour of the millions of
German war dead. He added that in 50 years Hitler would be known as the Saint
from Braunau.

12 comments:

Bill maybe you would like to read more about a Spanish diplomat, Ángel Sanz Briz who saved the lives of some five thousand [1] Hungarian Jews from Nazi persecution. This is a link to his Wikipedia page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81ngel_Sanz_Briz

What a well-written and thoughtful post about choices, Bill. I think that it all comes down to that, really. And it's during circumstances such as the Nazi regime that people really look inside, as the saying goes, and decide which choices they will make.

Kathy D.: Thanks for the comment. My good friend, Doug Elliott, who is a gay man noted on my Facebook sharing of the post that he would have been in a concentration camp. There would have been no choice for him.

World War II and the Third Reich is one of the most interesting topics I have read about and there seems to be so much information one can never read it all. Often we pay more attention to the bad choices people make or the bad things that happen to people and it is good to remember that there were people who chose to be courageous and risk their lives and futures. These posts have been very informative, Bill.